


Requiem For a Dreamsequence

by Femalefonzie



Category: Clone High
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Dreams vs. Reality, Fluff and Humor, Gen, Hospitals, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I don’t know how to tag this, I don’t know why I wrote this, Just have some cute friendship or romance, Language, M/M, Oh yes I do. Because Ponce’s death was too damn sad, Ponce is a good bro, References to Drugs, and the way the episodes were released left open a door for me to work with
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 17:13:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17687579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Femalefonzie/pseuds/Femalefonzie
Summary: Someone’s snoring which is very weird considering it’s the middle of the afternoon, the sun is beating down on them, and as far as JFK can tell, everyone around him is awake...~~~JFK has one really bad nightmare.





	Requiem For a Dreamsequence

Someone’s snoring which is very weird considering it’s the middle of the afternoon, the sun is beating down on them, and as far as JFK can tell, everyone around him is awake. Joan is the closest to him, tossing empty soda cups into a trash can and trying her best to get Abe’s attention. Her eyes are wide open, locked on her friend, who in turn is mid-conversation with Cleo. Ghandi is sitting in the now clean grass with his convict friends having finished their part of the clean up and talking about whatever was on the menu for dinner that night at the prison. They were all awake. His animal friends, already retreating back to their natural habitats, were also quite clearly awake but then when where was that snoring coming from? He turned back around to ask Joan (the person who, he would argue, was the smartest of his collective volunteers) if she heard it to but found himself staring into a black, widening abyss where she had been standing. “Now-Er...that’s definitely new.” He said to himself because no one was around to hear him. Where had everyone gone? They’d been here just a second ago. How could they have all disappeared so fast?

 

“Huh...” JFK mumbled and kicked a nearby rock into the abyss. It disappeared with a soft clunk. “...Maybe Joan is a witch after all.” It would explain what this mass of time and space was doing here. The teen tilted his head and tried to get a better look at thing. Nope. From every angle it looked weird.

 

“What am I er-uh supposed to do with you?” He asked the abyss, and inwardly prayed that the abyss didn’t answer him. Weird things happened to him all the time, it came with the territory of being a clone, but talking tares in the universe was where he drew the line. Thankfully it did not reply.

 

“Okay then. I’m just gonna go back inside.” This clearly wasn’t a problem for him to solve. Seducing a super spy, charming his way into secret meetings, running, those were heroic plots that he could handle. Not this shit.

 

As he started to walk something told JFK to look back. Without breaking his pace the teen glanced back at the abyss. It wasn’t black anymore. Some bright, increasingly blinding light broke through the darkness and was overcoming the blackness. As the light spread it grew in intensity until JFK couldn’t look at it anymore and had to cover his eyes. His ears started to ring and he had trouble steadying his hand, and then nothing. With caution he slid the hand that had shielded his eyes down and peaked them back open. A white tile ceiling was overhead, a fluorescent light flickered for a moment before stabilizing itself, and a clean, sterile scent wafted through the air. JFK looked down at himself. He was laying in a cot, a thin, scratchy blanket was covering his lower half and he wasn’t wearing his normal clothes. Instead he wore a long, pale blue shirt that he quickly realized wasn’t a regular shirt. It was a hospital gown. He was in the hospital.

 

“What the fuck?” The teen said and bolted upright in bed. How long had he been here? What was he even here for? JFK couldn’t remember anything! The last thing he could think of was-

 

“Oh hey. You’re up.”

 

JFK looked to his left. Sitting in an uncomfortable looking hospital chair with his feet up on a small, cheap, circular coffee table was a ghost.

 

“Po...Ponce?” JFK asked and rubbed at his eyes. Was he dreaming or was this the genie version of Ponce that he’d seen before? This Ponce looked solid, he wasn’t cut or covered in bruises and gashes like genie-Ponce, and he seemed really relaxed for a dead guy. This had to be a dream... “Ponce?”

 

“Hey, hey. Relax,” Ponce pulled his feet off the table and stood up. Coming over to him, Ponce sat down on the edge of the bed and placed his hand on JFK’s shoulder. “Doctors said to take it easy Buddy.”

 

“I don’t...I don’t understand...” Ponce felt real. When he’d touched genie-Ponce it felt like sticking his hand through the spray of a sprinkler. There was something there, but vaporized and fake. But he’d buried Ponce...”H-how are you alive right now?”

 

“What?” Ponce asked with an understandable concern for anyone who’sfriend was asking them such a question. “What are you talking about Jackie-Boy?”

 

“You’re dead,” JFK said through clenched teeth. It had taken him days to stop crying. Everyone in school had seen him as an inconsolable mess. He made a jackass of himself in front of the entire student body! He spent hours on his knees in a church crying and screaming at whatever God would listen that Ponce didn’t deserve to die, and now that he saw him here, acting like nothing had happened and that he was crazy, the anger in the pit of JFK’s stomach flared up. He screamed, “I saw your body....I went to your funeral! You’re dead!”

 

“Woah...woah...just calm down,” Ponce said and held up both of his hands in defence. Whenever JFK got angry like this it was best for everyone to try and calm him down as quickly as possible or risk a full scale meltdown complete with the popular teen screaming bloody murder at whoever happened to be near by, his voice jumping several octaves in the process. It was killer on the ears. “It’s okay Jack. It’s okay. I’m fine. See? Perfectly fine.”

 

“You weren’t. You were dead. Drowned to death in your own blood ‘cause o’ the litter!” JFK actually wailed and flopped his head dramatically back against his pillow. Despite the dark reveal and his friend’s obvious distress, Ponce had to stifle a chuckle. The presidential clone could be a real drama queen when he wanted to be; rivalling even Cleopatra. “And then we had your funeral, and your dad had to leave, and I slugged your corpse-“

 

“Jesus Jack.” Ponce interrupted him, not wanting to hear anymore of such a terrible dream. “It wasn’t real. None of it was real buddy. It was just a bad dream.”

 

“A...a bad dream?” JFK asked. The thought had never occurred to him that he had been dreaming the whole thing. Then again, in hindsight, days had passed and he didn’t remember going to bed or even feeling tired during his time mourning Ponce. All he remembered was the crying and the intense misery.

 

“Yeah. You were tossing for a bit but I didn’t want to wake you up. Doc said you needed your sleep.” Ponce explained. He felt like such a moron for not noticing that his friend was in distress sooner. In hindsight it was clear that JFK was having some sort of nightmare and Ponce had just sat back and let it happen. Luckily he didn’t have too much time to wallow in self pity because JFK sat back up and slugged him hard in the arm.

 

“Ow!” Ponce screamed, his other hand clamping down over the assaulted area. That was going to bruise tomorrow! “Fuck, Jack! What was that for!”

 

“You felt that?” JFK asked without needing too, having witnessed the pain himself. He rolled the sleeve of his hospital gown up and pinched his bicep. The other boy winced, but it was quickly replaced with a happy grin, “And I felt that! So this is real! You’re really alive!”

 

“Oh god JFK I worry about you sometimes.” Everyone in town knew that the Kennedy boy wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box but somehow he tested well, and his grades didn’t reflect that fact, so most people let him off the hook. Not Ponce. He often found himself chasing behind his friend on some wild goose chase sparked by some insane thought process Ponce would never be able to decipher. One time there was an actual goose chase. “Yes. I am alive, this is real, and all that nasty shit was just a nightmare. I promise you that I’m 100% okay.”

 

“You’re alive!” JFK practically flung himself at Ponce and threw his arms around him, pulling him close and squeezing him tight. The other, shorter boy coughed and struggled to catch his breath in JFK’s bear-grip, but didn’t tell him to let go. His best friend wasn’t usually this...physically affectionate. Whatever he saw in that, however Ponce’s death played out, it must have really done a number on him. “Ponce I missed you so much! I thought I killed you, and then Abe kissed me, and I summoned a bunch of animals to help clean up the campus-“

 

“Oh wow. Those raisins really did a number on you didn’t they?”

 

“Raisins?” JFK repeated, and to Ponce’s relief his grip on him loosened slightly, allowing him time to catch some air. “What do raisins have to do with anything?”

 

“You don’t remember?” Ponce asked. “You OD’ed, dude. Took way too much of the purple stuff and fell through the roof of the gym.”

 

And hadn’t that been something wonderful to come home to? After having a slightly extended summer and taking a few extra weeks to venture across Europe with his old man, Ponce returns home to find the school full of freaky hippies and half of his friends dancing naked in the mud on the school quad! Everything after that was pretty much a blur. Hardly anyone was showing up to class anymore, JFK seemed to have moved into his van and given up wearing shirts, and then one night Ponce is in his room going over a chemistry assignment and in comes his dad to say that his best friend was unconscious in the hospital. Not the homecoming that the former explorer had been expecting. “I thought I lost you for a second there Buddy,” He confessed since JFK seemed to have no problems getting into their feelings tonight. “But that was a couple days ago. Been here ever since trying to come down and patch up your leg.”

 

“My leg?” JFK repeated and looked down at himself, noticing the large, clunky white plaster cast for the first time, and only just realizing that he couldn’t feel anything there. “Holy shit my leg is broken!”

 

Coach Roosevelt wasn’t going to like this news but that old crone would just have to deal with it. Besides, knowing JFK (who had crashed four cars since freshman year alone) he’d be back on his feet and leading the track team to victory in no time. Ponce took the distraction to wriggle free from JFK’s hold and sit back at the edge of the bed. “It’ll get better soon buddy. Don’t you worry about it.”

 

“I’m just glad you’re okay!” The other boy exclaimed. “That was the worst dream I ever had in my life.”

 

“No kidding.” Ponce looked down at the white tile floor. Could he have done anything to prevent the dream from happening? He should have woken his friend up when he saw he was uncomfortable. Hell, he shouldn’t have been out of school for so long and let things get to the point where his friend was smoking fruit on the school roof! But since he couldn’t apologize for that, Ponce said the next best thing. “...I’m sorry I didn’t wake you up from it.”

 

“It’s okay dude,” JFK replied and pushed some of his hair back. Three days in the hospital with no hair gel and his pompadour was starting to come loose. Little brown curls were falling into his eyes and JFK was left tucking them back into place or to the side. It had been a long time since Ponce saw his friend with natural hair. “How long have you been here?”

 

“Since you were brought in,” Give or take an hour for the news to reach him and his father. Once they had found out about JFK it had only taken Ponce a couple minutes to get into the hospital, locate his buddy’s room, and meet up with his parents. They saw the whole thing. Saw their son fall through a glass window and snap his leg in half like a twig while spouting nonsense. In a way, Ponce was glad he hadn’t been there to see that part. “Me and your dads have been doing shifts waiting for you to come too.”

 

“Oh shit my dads!” JFK said as if he was remembering for the first time that he actually had parents, and that they had to go through the days of silence and waiting for a response as well. He groaned and thumped his head back into the wall above the headboard. “They’re gonna kill me for smoking raisins!”

 

“I think they’re just glad you’re okay,” Wally would be at least. And he’d probably start crying. Knowing Carl, he would put up a stoic front and attempt to give his son a lecture before realizing that he didn’t have it in him at the moment and giving up. They were kind of like Ponce’s own father in that way. If their roles had been reversed, if Ponce had been the one to OD, he knew that his dad would just be happy to see him healing. He’d wait, then lecture. Ponce suspected that it was this gentle upbringing that made Wally so fond of him. It was obvious that Ponce was his favourite one of his son’s friends. As for Carl, well, he was more protective of his family then he liked to let on. “If it helps I’ll tell them about the fever dream you had where I died a gruesome death, and maybe they’ll ease up a bit.”

 

“Maybe.” JFK replied. “...before you died...-in the dream, you wanted to say something to me.”

 

“I did?” Ponce asked, moving slightly closer.

 

“Yeah. But I was kinda a dick about it-“

 

“You? Really?”

 

“Fuck off Ponce. It’s been a rough couple days,” JFK said and Ponce just shrugged his shoulders. Fair enough. “Anyways, you wouldn’t happen to know would you?”

 

“Sorry buddy.” Ponce wished he could answer the question but it was pretty much impossible considering the Ponce who was going to tell JFK something was only a figment of JFK’s imagination and subconscious so it very much could have been anything from a heartfelt compliment to something stupid and related to a memory he had long since forgotten; like the names of every My little pony character. The other boy sighed but nodded his head to show that he understood why his best-friend couldn’t answer, and took the time to tuck another loose curl, closer to the side, back behind his ear.

 

“When we get back to school, promise me that you’ll throw out all your trash properly from now on?” He asked.

 

“Jack, my dad’s the janitor. I always throw my trash out. Of all the ways to have me die in your dream...” He could have been eaten by a shark, or died fighting off Jason Vorhees, but no. JFK’s subconscious had him drown in his own litter.

 

“Thank god.” The track-star mumbled under his breath; soft to the point where Ponce could barely hear it. JFK adjusted himself as best as he could with his broken leg and spoke up again. This time though his voice wavered, “Hey Ponce? You...this uh is...if I ask you to do something sorta weird, you promise not to be mad?”

 

“Considering,” Ponce said and gestured to his friend as if to illustrate his point. “No. I promise I won’t be mad.”

 

“You remember when we were little and you used to sleep over at my house? And you’d have those, uh-“

 

“Night terrors?” Ponce asked, cocking an eyebrow. He didn’t see how that could relate to anything. It had been years ago.“I haven’t had a night terror in ten years Jack. I-oh. I get it.”

 

JFK crossed his arms in front of his chest and turned to look at the far wall, “You can say no, Er uh whatever.”

 

“I don’t mind.” Ponce replied. When JFK still didn’t turn to look back at him but moved over a bit, Ponce took the chance to lay back against the pillows and slip under the blankets. JFK, still avoiding eye contact, moved back and leaned against him. “If it helps you get better sooner, then I have no problems sleeping next to my best bro.”

 

“Thanks Ponce,” The other teen mumbled softly. He yawned and relaxed, lazily curling up into Ponce’s side and stretching an arm across the other boy’s torso. Ponce frowned. That nightmare really must have been bad. Normally JFK would say something about “no homo” if he were going to get this cuddly. Ponce wrapped an arm around JFK’s shoulder and instead of hearing a gay joke, JFK just sighed and shut his eyes, completely at ease with the contact. “...you’ll be here when I wake up again right?”

 

“I’ll be right here.” Ponce promised. Assuming JFK’s dads didn’t find them like this and freak out. Then again, knowing Wally & Carl, they’d probably be ecstatic to find their son in bed with another boy. Still, Ponce suspected that Carl didn’t like him as much as he let on. It must have been the leather jacket. It had a habit of making parents uncomfortable. The old bad-boy trope and all that nonsense.

 

The other boy yawned again though how he could be this tired, Ponce did not know. He had spent three days in a coma, after all. “I love ya Poncey.”

 

“I love you too Jackie-boy.”


End file.
